I spent two days recently enjoying being in Cornwall attending and presenting at the first Cornish agile conference Agile on the beach.

The event was a great success with world class speakers (you can see the full list on the website), and an actual beach party on the thursday night with a band (All the fires) and hogroast. The organisation was also superb, co-ordinated by Event cornwall. From the attendee perspective, It was great to meet and talk to such a good turn out of passionate developers and companies.

I have some involvement in the genesis of the event. My dad, Mike Barritt is working for a company called Oxford innovation who are helping companies in cornwall to develop and grow. At some point a while ago, I had connected him with Roger Marlow and suggested that a good way to help everyone get into agile was to host a conference. A year or so later, and I found myself down in cornwall amongst some of the people I have massive respect for in the industry. The event has also had a great sponsorship and support from ThoughtWorks, which makes me really appreciate what an amazing company it is to work for.

Some highlights for me were hearing Mary and Tom Poppendieck talking about Lean Startup and running a value stream mapping workshop, Kevlin Henney reminding us all that software should be FUN, and Jason Gorman firing us up to keep our focus on quality codemanship and staying out of the “Anaerobic” zone when developing code. It was also great to see everyone getting down to the code in a dojo with Jon Jagger, to have the fantastic Rachel Davies helping people with common agile adoption problems, and have Steve Freeman talking about TDD. Quite a line-up!

Unfortunately I couldn’t attend my colleague James Lewis’ talk as we were speaking at the same time, but I have seen the slides and it sounded awesome, so I hope to catch it another day. Parallell to us was Roger so I missed his talk too, but it sounded like he had a good time.

I managed to make a presentation myself, talking through some of the experiences I have had as a consultant working for ThoughtWorks, and in particular some developer practices. I over estimated the amount of material I was trying to get through but did manage to get to a few key points! For those who attended a couple of interesting jump points to follow up might be Martin Fowler on Feature Toggles, gource (the tool at the end), and The continuous delivery book by Jez Humble.

All in all, the event was a great time and I hope that it signifies the beginnings of putting cornwall on the world stage for software development and high tech companies!

(Image from maubrowncow @ flikrcc)

A few people have persuaded me to move from MacPorts to HomeBrew and for a while it’s been bugging me with messages about how it might be incompatible with ports. I finally got round to uninstalling ports and found this link on the mac ports site a great help. Now I just have to re-install all the ports.

A few years ago whilst working on my MSc thesis I was heavily into R a statistical analysis package which has a functional language feel to it. My friend Marc Hasenbank, a few others and I ran a series of workshops for people wanting an introduction to R. I recently wanted to show this to someone so thought I would post a link. The code from the tutorials can be found here

First put the following script somewhere, like ~/git_completion.sh and chmod +x it.

Then add this line to your ~/.bash_profile:

. ~/git_completion.sh

Finally, if you want to pretty up your prompt as above, then add this:

export PS1=’\h:\W \[\e[1;32m\]$(__git_ps1 “[%s]“)\[\e[0m\] > ‘

You can also install git from http://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer/ (Thanks Jon)

Or on ubuntu install a package called “git-completion” (Thanks Juan)

I have been working on converting our codebase to JUnit, with a secondary aim of trying out JUnitMax.

I ran the Max and quickly discovered that it failed when trying to execute assertions using the Hamcrest hasItems matcher.

The assertion looks something like:

NoSuchMethodException describeMismatch

This error frequently occurs because JUnit packages an older Version of the org.hamcrest.Matcher class which does not have the describeMismatch method.

I dug around a bit in the plugins directory in the eclipse install folder and found that it contains a junit-4.8.2.jar. Happy days I thought, I can simply do what I’ve been getting used to doing for a while and replace it with junit-dep-4.8.2.jar which does not contain the hamcrest classes.

Unfortunately this didn’t quite work. It turns out that you need to call it exactly the same junit-4.8.2.jar. I thought this was because there’s an entry in the MANIFEST.MF file but I tried to change it and that didn’t work too well.

Renaming the Jar file however works a treat and now I have full JUnitMax action on my box.

I’ve posted on the JUnitMax forums about the problem here.

I’ve been using the R language for some years now but didn’t have it installed on my current machine.

TextMate is a great editor to use as it has a custom bundle that gives you syntax highlighting and executes commands for you in the R console.

To install the R bundle:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/
svn co http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Bundles/R.tmbundle/

Then in TextMate choose Bundles->Bundle Editor->Reload Bundles.

There is one tweak I make which is that I like to press ⌘ + RETURN to execute the current selection in the R console. So edit the bundle and find R.app in the commands and change the key. Also I like it to return back to text mate afterwards, so I add the following to the script:

-e ‘tell application “TextMate” to activate’ \

I also removed the line about setting the current dir. This was a little fiddly – I found that I had to make sure I selected the entire line and cut it then delete, making sure there are no end of line characters. So it looks like this:

# input is selection or document
rawText=”`cat`”
curDir=”
if [[ ${#TM_DIRECTORY} -gt 0 ]]; then
	curDir=”$TM_DIRECTORY”
fi
osascript -e ‘on run(theCode)’ \
		  -e ‘tell application “R” to activate’ \
		  -e ‘tell application “R” to cmd (item 1 of theCode)’ \
		  -e ‘tell application “TextMate” to activate’ \
		  -e ‘end run’ — “$rawText” “$curDir”

All good.

UPDATE: 07/02/2011 – R now comes with a 64bit version so if you are on a macbook you can replace “R” in the code above with “R64″

We just spent a few glorious hours or so trawling the internet and writing old skool jdbc code, to discover this little beauty. Simply upgrade to 10.2.0.5 of the jdbc driver and it goes away.

Thanks to this post http://efreedom.com/Question/1-377745/Oracle-JDBC-Euro-Character we discovered our problem.

For the full details on the euro….

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/20ac/index.htm

And if your really bored:

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f47e/index.htm

Ever had the feeling that your build file was a tad complex?

The above is a visualisation provided by the excellent program grand. This particular build script utilises the ASL ant library. I think it might need some love.

Producing the visualisation is very easy. Simply download the jar file and then some ant scripting…

You need to have GraphViz installed which should give you a command line program called “dot”. You can simply try :

dot –help

On the command line to see if you have it installed.

I have a working version on github

My first foray into customising emacs that didn’t involve copy and paste from something on the internet.

The problem with OS X and the uk keyboard is that the pound key actually has a £ on it. To get “#” you have to press alt+3

Of course, in emacs, the alt key is the meta key which is trapped by emacs. The simple function above inserted into your .emacs file should map the keys correctly.

Another option would be to re-map the apple key to be the meta key, perhaps another yak.

For copy and paste-ability:

;; Allow hash to be entered
(defun insert-pound ()
  “Inserts a pound into the buffer”
  (insert “#”))
(global-set-key (kbd “M-3″) ‘(lambda()(interactive)(insert-pound)))

I was recently installing a new machine and getting a strange feeling that something was awry with my IntelliJ fonts. They looked like they were not being anti-aliased, even though I had checked the correct option. Also I noticed that generally fonts were looking a bit ropey.

After some puzzling I discovered the dialog above. If you right click on the desktop then to properties->appearance->effects… you will see it and you need to make sure the font smoothing is checked.

Phew, now I have beautiful code again.